Accuracy in EAP

Proofreading: Word order

Introduction

Many mistakes are simply avoided by proofreading.

Whenever you learn a new word, it is useful to learn typical situations in which it occurs. You need to know in which subjects it is used, what kinds of texts it is used in, and which other words it typically occurs with. Look at the example sentences in your dictionary and find examples of the uses of the word in your text-books.

You can use the Internet to help you with this. Type any word or phrase - use "quotation marks" to search for a phrase - into a search engine and examine the results. You will often find hundreds of examples of the use of the word or phrase. You need to look at the examples carefully to see what kind of writing they are from. There are, though, many examples of academic, business and government texts on the Internet and examples from these sources should be useful.